There’s no money in yoga. Five words, said the way people mention the rain. And that little sentence has quietly cost more teaching careers than any slow term ever has.
Nobody pushes back on it, because pushing back would sound naive, and the person saying it has usually been teaching longer than you anyway. By your second year you’ve heard it so often you’ve stopped hearing it as a claim. It’s just part of the furniture now. And the beliefs sitting in the furniture are the ones quietly making your decisions for you.
So: an audit, both columns. What believing the line may already have decided for you, and what the evidence about teaching careers actually says.
When to use this
- The week somebody says it near you and it lands
- When a fee review or a new class idea keeps sliding, on the grounds that there’s no point
- Before you decide anything about next term with that sentence still in the room
What the sentence has already decided
A belief you never check doesn’t stay still. It starts making choices for you.
Part of the trouble is that the line costs nothing to say. It sounds like realism, and it asks nothing of the person repeating it. Claims like that always travel further than the checking does, so you can carry this one for years without ever testing it yourself.
Look back over the last couple of years for its fingerprints. There’s the beginners’ course you never launched, because it surely wouldn’t fill. There’s the fee you’ve left sitting for three years, so as not to upset the room. Neither one felt like a decision when it happened.
And that’s the point. Research on how people weigh change shows you rarely audit a belief you inherited; you protect your present self from small risks and leave your future self to pick up the cost. A sentence taken in during year one can still be declining invitations in year ten.
So the first move is just to see the record. Write down what the sentence has already decided for you. Real things, rough dates where you can manage them. Do it and you’ll probably find two or three entries you didn’t expect.
What the evidence shows
Now the other column, because an audit needs both sides.
For most of the profession, teaching yoga is part-time by design. It runs alongside other work and around family, in the evenings and the early mornings. That’s how a teaching life usually gets built, and it can hold a real livelihood when there’s structure under it: classes that keep their regulars, fees reviewed on a calendar instead of in a crisis.
The sentence has the profession’s own history to argue with, too. The professional body behind this work has been here since 2006, long enough to watch teaching careers cross their tenth year and keep going. Nobody handed those teachers a packed room, though. They built the structure and they stayed.
And the strongest evidence against it is already in your hands. A class that’s held its regulars through two winters, or a venue that asks for you by name. The record itself: your trainings finished, the hours you’ve taught year on year.
The audit, on paper
Take one page and rule two columns.
Left column: what has this sentence decided for me so far. The real entries, however small they look now. Ten minutes, no editing.
Right column: what has believing it kept me safe from. Be fair here. Disappointment, mostly. The awkwardness of asking for things. A belief that costs you this much is usually guarding something, which is why it’s lasted this long.
Then read the two columns side by side and write one line at the bottom: the decision I’d make this term if the sentence weren’t true. One decision. The course finally launched, or the Thursday evening finally accepted.
Take that line seriously. It came from the teacher you are with the sentence out of the room.
Action steps
- Today, write the sentence in quotation marks at the top of a page. Quoting it moves it out of the weather and back into claim territory.
- Spend ten minutes listing what it has decided for you so far, with rough dates.
- Add the fairness column: what believing it has protected you from.
- Write the one decision you’d make this term if it weren’t true.
- Put a date on that decision’s first small step, and tell one person who will ask you about it.
Related resources
- What you charge is a sentence you wrote
- The quiet month
One more entry for the evidence column: this profession keeps records. The standards its professional body verifies are built on what a teaching career actually adds up to, the hours and the years in the room. A saying about scarcity ages badly next to a record like that.